Which charset to use?

which charset to use with foreign web sites

[noah_body]

I'm currently working on 3 versions of a website... English, French, and German.

For pages I've done myself (working from translated documents) I've use charset=iso-8859-1, but the pages I've gotten back from one of the translators uses charset=windows-1252 . Should I switch theirs over to 8859-1 and substitute html special characters for maximum browser compatibility?

Thanks

MS

[DrDoc]

iso-8859-1 = latin-1 = works with all Western European languages

You can probably use iso-8859-1 and leave the page as-is.

As for converting special characters... All characters higher than ASCII 127 should be converted to their respective HTML entities, always.

[bird]

Should I switch theirs over to 8859-1 and substitute html special characters for maximum browser compatibility?

In practise, windows-1252 should work too in all reasonably current browsers, although I don't know whether it has ever been sanctioned by any independent standars body. Personally, I'd probably convert to the charset you use for your other pages, for reasons of consistency (making your future work easier). There is no need to use HTML entities in either case, assuming that the encoding of the pages is marked correctly.

All characters higher than ASCII 127 should be converted to their respective HTML entities, always.

And what's your explanation why charsets were introduced to HTML? This advice is only useful if you want to encode your pages in US-ASCII. If you encode the pages in a character set that specifies all the special characters you need, then you won't have to use any HTML entities. At the other end of the spectrum, you can use an Unicode encoding (eg. UTF-8), and you won't have to use HTML entities ever.